Black everyday life and the burden of death in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying

ABSTRACT

Zakes Mda’s novel, Ways of Dying, centers on physical violence and death in black communities during the transition from apartheid to democracy. Rather than look toward a post-apartheid future that is anticipated by so many, Mda depicts the reality of death as the product of the volatile politics of late apartheid, demonstrating through the lives of his characters the ways in which systemic violence persists. Set in the early 1990s, the pervasive experience of death and inescapable poverty is relentlessly depicted, unmasking any illusion of positive transformation. The novel debunks the widely celebrated idea or impression of the country’s transition as remarkable or peaceful; its focus on the tens of thousands killed at the tail-end of apartheid refuses this untruth. Mda invites a critical understanding of black literal death, its horror in the questions about mourning raised, and the structural conditions that confine black lives even as a grand narrative is being told outside this novel’s pages.

KEYWORDS:

• Death
• transcendence
• blackness
• South Africa

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ In the novel, Vutha is nicknamed the second because he is Noria’s second son. Her first son died in a fire and the second one was born by immaculate conception. His virginal birth and spectacular death read as Christlike.

² Amid the universally celebrated release of the liberation icon, Nelson Mandela, and other anti-apartheid political prisoners, the early 1990s featured peaceful negotiations between the liberationist African National Congress (ANC) and the conservative National Party (NP), the Afrikaner nationalist party which had instituted apartheid in 1949. These negotiations heralded a multi-racial unity government under Mandela’s leadership that was elected into office by all South Africans in the country’s first free and fair election. This outcome seemed remarkable especially in the wake of the volatility and pessimism of the 1980s during which period the beleaguered white minority regime had seemed hopelessly intransigent in the face of increasing international isolation, on the one hand, and increasingly restless in the destitute black townships.

³ Violent so-called black on black conflict intensified throughout the transition in the townships, squatter camps, and mining areas of Johannesburg, later to spread to Kwa-Zulu Natal and other parts of the country. The clashes depicted in the novel reenact the real-life deadly conflicts, which pitted supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) against supporters the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a reactionary Zulu nationalist party led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Although neither entity is explicitly identified, Mda does not disguise the fact that the unnamed anti-apartheid Party represents the ANC. Similarly, the unidentified reactionary tribal chief described in the novel is a thinly veiled representation of Buthelezi. Reactionary elements of the dying white regime fomented and escalated the deadly intra-racial violence. Even though the real-life violence pitted members of the resurgent ANC against the reeling IFP, it seems indisputable that elements of the ruling National Party (NP) played a key role in agitating and financing the deadly conflict. Specifically, state agents help provide IFP with weapons: as Leonard Thompson contends, “South African army and police units provided valuable assistance to the IFP in the form of money, training, weapons, and personnel, and collaborated with the ‘homeland’ government in covert activities against the ANC” (250).

⁴ Mda, Ways of Dying, 13.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Thompson, A History of South Africa, 248. (Emphasis my own.)

⁷ Chipkin, Do South Africans Exist? 316–17.

⁸ Rankine, “On Racial Violence: the condition of black life is one of mourning,” The New York Times Magazine, June 22, 2015. Rankine reflecting in the New York Times Magazine on the precarity of black life, multiple deaths as a result of police brutality and the fact of racism in the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement, Emmet Till’s mutilated body, and the pervasive presence of white racist violence in the United States. The reality of black South Africans is so profoundly impacted by the lasting realities of structural racism that black everyday life is one of death and mourning as Rankine observes of the United States.

⁹ Mda, Ways of Dying, 20.

¹⁰ See Farred, “Mourning the postapartheid state already?”.

¹¹ Mda, Ways of Dying, 124.

¹² Ibid.,12–13.

¹³ Ibid., 13.

¹⁴ Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies.

¹⁵ Ibid., 12.

¹⁶ Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 337.

¹⁷ Marriot, “Corpsing; or, the matter of black life,” 34.

¹⁸ Warren, “Onticide: Afro-pessimism, Gay Nigger #1, and Surplus Violence,” 108.

¹⁹ Cited in Sharpe, In The Wake, 7: from a talk titled “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the black Cyborgs” by Joy James and João Costa Vargas. Here James and Vargas ask us to no longer respond with rage and shock to black death when it is the very essence of democracy in the United States.

²⁰ Van Wyk, “Catastrophe and beauty,” 88.

²¹ The government instituted Pass Laws necessitating that black people carry a passbook that functioned like a passport and required specific permits that detailed where they could live and work. The pass laws and passbooks were used to control this influx of people, treating them as foreigners by policing their every movement in order to assert white superiority. Additionally, the offensive documents enabled authorities to regulate the movement of blacks ensuring that only a small number of unskilled workers who were formally allowed daily access into white cities in order to provide backbreaking, undignified and exploited menial labor in dangerous mines or factories.

²² Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death,” 37.

²³ Mda, Ways of Dying, 3.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid., 167.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Significantly, Vutha’s death in Ways of Dying correlates uncannily with the infamous case of Stompie Seipei, a teenager who was callously tortured before being cruelly murdered in 1989 by members of the Mandela United Football Club for being an impimpi (a police informer). The club was founded in Soweto as a social welfare and self-defense group after the state of emergency declared by P.W. Botha on 21 July 1985 (South African History online). The emergency led to a state of siege in restive black townships. The club consisted of young men dedicated to protecting Winnie Mandela. But they degenerated into a vigilante organization determined to expose and punish alleged police informers. Many of their targets were teenagers, often identified on the basis of dubious suspicion or flimsy evidence. Stompie’s activities had somehow conspired to attract the suspicions of members of the Mandela United Football club. He mysterious disappeared in the wake of being kidnapped and taken to Mrs. Mandela’s home. His body would not be found for fully two decades. Evidence presented at TRC as well as the trials of Winnie Mandela and various members of the club, strongly suggested that the young man had been brutally tortured in the hope of securing as confession before being killed as a graphic warning to other would be informers.

²⁹ Mda, Ways of Dying, 174.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid., 177.

³² Boraine, A Country Unmasked, 224.

³³ Mda, Ways of Dying, 177.

³⁴ Lopez, “Communities of Mourning and Vulnerability,” 107.

³⁵ Christina Sharpe uses this term in Monstrous Intimacies (2010) to refer to the familiar, intimate forms of racialized subjugation that continue to shape black and white subjectivities in the United States, Southern Africa and the Global South.

³⁶ Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 3.

³⁷ Ibid., 4.

³⁸ Warren, “Onticide: Afro-pessimism, Gay Nigger #1, and Surplus Violence,” 392.

³⁹ Fincham, Ways of Dancing, xvi.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 20.

⁴¹ Lopez, “Communities of Mourning and Vulnerability,” 103.

⁴² Van Wyk, “Catastrophe and beauty,” 106.

⁴³ Ibid., 88.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Wenzel, “Appropriating space and transcending boundaries,” 320.

⁴⁶ Mda, Ways of Dying, 62.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 146.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 103.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Ibid., 104.

⁵³ Ibid., 105.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Myambo, “The limits of Rainbow Nation Multiculturalism in the South Africa,” 108.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 109.

⁵⁷ Mda, Ways of Dying, 199.

⁵⁸ Myambo, “The limits of Rainbow Nation Multiculturalism in the South Africa,” 109.

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Notes on contributors

Mandisa Haarhoff

Dr. Mandisa Haarhoff is a lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Cape Town. She completed her PhD at the University of Florida (2018) and holds an MA in Drama from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Dr. Haarhoff teaches South African literature, and her current research focuses on constructions of white indigeneity and black absenting in the South African Farm novel.